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April 24, 2005
Actor-friends who met on stage star in family drama
By Evan Henerson
Los Angeles Daily News
Nearly eight years ago, future "West Wing" star Allison Janney left a mark on Broadway's 1997-98 season . . . and on her scene partner's face.
During a performance of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge" at the Roundabout Theatre Company, Janney -- in the role of Beatrice, the neglected wife of a longshoreman -- got a little too intense with Anthony LaPaglia's Eddie Carbone.
"On one particular night when we clashed on stage, my teeth went into his nose, and he just started bleeding," Janney recalls. "I was looking at him, trying to do the text and also tell him he's bleeding to death on stage. To this day, he still has a scar from my upper teeth. We're really powerful together."
LaPaglia and Janney -- the former an Australian, the latter a Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts-trained Ohioan, and both with much experience treading the boards in New York -- ended up with day jobs on the same Warner Bros. lot where "Without a Trace's" stoic FBI bloodhound Jack Malone tracks down missing persons, and C.J. Cregg, "The West Wing's" press-secretary-turned-chief-of-staff, has the president's ear.
"We run into each other at all the mandatory functions," LaPaglia says of Janney. "She and my wife get on really well, and her boyfriend is a big soccer stud, so he and I get on really well. I just feel like I have a friendship with her for life probably."
LaPaglia, who didn't hold a grudge over that teeth-to-nose incident, agrees that the connection during performances between himself and Janney is a force not to be ignored.
"We did the play for a year, and there would be days when I would be coming to work, I'd be on the subway, thinking, 'I just don't want to do this tonight. I'm just not in the mood. I just can't go to that place anymore,' " says LaPaglia. "The minute I would lock eyes with Allison on stage, I could see she was there. You just had to go with her."
Fast forward to spring 2003. LaPaglia, 45, and Janney, 44, reunite on the low-budget family drama "Winter Solstice" (now playing in limited release). LaPaglia -- the film's star and executive producer -- persuaded Janney to take the film's only adult female role.
The appeal this time: tackling a pair of roles with more subtext than overt, in-your-face drama. Since the death of his wife several years ago, landscape architect Jim Winters (LaPaglia) is having a rough time keeping his two sons on track. New possibilities arrive when Molly Ripkin (Janney) borrows a tool from Winters and then offers to make dinner as a gesture of gratitude.
That means the actors have graduated from playing a tormented longshoreman and his Italian wife in 1950s Brooklyn to a pair of suburban New Jerseyites so ill at ease with contemporary dating that when they end up alone together, they can barely say five words to each other.
LaPaglia won a Tony award for "A View From the Bridge," and Janney was nominated for her role. But the two are just as capable of playing smaller, more nuanced drama, says "Solstice" writer-director Josh Sternfeld.
"Allison's comfort with her emotional vulnerability is what put her on an equal plane with Anthony, and that was ultimately going to be the engine for their dynamic," says Sternfeld. "I wanted to make an adult romantic love story with 40-year-olds acting like 12-year-olds and bringing all the natural anxiety and insecurity to the first step toward romance you would have as a kid."
"When Allison agreed to do it, I thought, 'OK, I've got the ingredients now. I just have to put it together,' " he says.
"We do sort of work similarly," Janney says of LaPaglia. "I like to find the truth and the emotional reality of a scene in the doing of it rather than sitting around and talking for hours. We were sort of able to dive in together."
To hear LaPaglia tell it, the Janney-LaPaglia creative partnership might never have materialized, and the direction of a now-iconic HBO drama might have taken a different turn as well.
As he was readying himself for "A View From the Bridge," LaPaglia received a script for the pilot of "The Sopranos." LaPaglia loved the script and even met with series creator David Chase over the prospect of playing Tony Soprano.
Had he followed "The Sopranos" through to development, LaPaglia's shot at "A View From the Bridge" -- a favorite play and role he had performed in acting class -- would have fallen through.
"For whatever the reasons were, 'The Sopranos' thing didn't work out," says LaPaglia, "and of course it did work out perfectly, because the right person ended up with the role. You can't imagine that show without James Gandolfini."
Meanwhile, when "A View From the Bridge" was auditioning for the role of Beatrice, Janney found herself neck and neck with another New York stage actress, Edie Falco.
"They were both brilliant, and we just couldn't decide which way to go," says LaPaglia, who is developing a film version of the play. "We ended up going with Allison, and because of that decision, Edie was able to go on and do 'The Sopranos,' which was going on at exactly the same time. So it worked out great for everybody, I think, in the end."
And he's got the lifelong friendship -- and the teeth marks -- as proof.
Posted by Jo at April 24, 2005 06:03 PM